The Pitch Elbow

[Travtex]

I stumbled across a book for my phone/kindle recently, and I'd definitely recommend it for beginners.  Very quick read, and pretty focused in intent, though the title oozes hyperbole (But, hey, marketing is what it is).  Tamayo's Finally: The Golf Swing's Simple Secret.

The focus of the book is quite simply on making a steeper shoulder turn and creating lag in the transition.  Now, I'm pretty athletic, and body proprioception is a strength.  I spent about twenty-five years practicing martial arts with varying degrees of enthusiasm before taking up golf -- Basically, I'm a newb and can't putt to save my life, but I pretty quickly figured out how to get a decent swing on the ball.

The change I made with that little transition move, which after a frenzy of research I figured out was cultivating a 'Pitch Elbow', made a pretty ridiculous difference in my contact.

Short irons and wedges gained about 5-10 yards, but more significantly gained an absurd amount of height.  My 52* was getting more height than my 58* used to.  I had success with clubs up to my 4 hybrid, which added about 20 to 25 yards from my previous "good shot" distance.  (Can't really say 'Average', as that includes any number of what the hell was THAT?! shots.)

Haven't been to a monitor, and I'm still getting comfortable with the changes, but I'd estimate a swing speed increase of 7-10 mph.

Also, I don't know if it means anything, but it -completely- changed my finish from an almost upright, abbreviated thing to a 'Rory' sort of thing where I was actually whacking myself in the back of the neck with my shaft a few times (Without even planning to make any changes to the finish/thinking about it/etc.).

That's the good.

The -down- side is that I can no longer say I don't hit shanks.  At first, I was doing it more often than not, almost to the point of giving up and going back to my more controlled swing.  Then, once I got the timing down a bit better, they seemed to go away for the most part.

Still, that seems to be my new miss -- Just an ungodly ugly low slicing atrocity 45* or more off-target.

Also, my driver swing still seems to suck, but at least now I can -feel- what I've been told about getting 'Too Quick'.  It feels all out of sync, timing-wise, and will definitely take some hours on the range to work out.

Now, I guess the starting-point question I have is this:  Going from a 'Punch' to a 'Pitch' elbow transition, is there some fundamental error that would make me prone to ugly hosel rockets?  Off the top of my head, I wonder about ball position, as getting that elbow in a different slot would surely change the distance I should be standing from the ball.  Just curious about some general trends and differences that should be accounted for.  Thanks.

(And for any fellow noobs that got as confused as I did about 'Maintaining the Angle', I definitely recommend the above book -- Worth the few bucks just for the creating lag section.  The word 'maintain' always seemed like some sort of active process to me, but with this kind of transition, it's a passive automatic thing.)

[MiniBlueDragon]

This was one of several books I bought for my iPad2, however I started off reading Stan Utley's The Art of The Short Game and Andrew Rice's It's All About Impact. I'm now on Jim Hardy's The Plane Truth but will check this out when I've finished that one and will also report back here :)

[Travtex]

I read one of Utley's books a while ago... Don't remember if it was Short Game or Scoring, but there for a while I was more or less building my entire swing on his lower body rotation.  As usual, there was overdoing it involved, so now I'm fixing THAT, etc. *hah*

Was hooking the crap out of my irons, today, which is actually promising for where I was wanting my experimentation to take me.  Have been reading through Joe Dante's stuff, and that version of the wrist cock coupled with the pitch elbow has gotten the swing path MUCH closer to where I was wanting it.

I'm still a bit surprised about the 'New' finish that's resulted.  It's pretty textbook after a year or so of just being accustomed to having a bizarre finish position, with zero in the way of conscious effort.  I think my plane was brutal steep, before.